LTER Observatory HAUSGARTEN

Long-Term Ecological Research in the deep Arctic Ocean

The marine Arctic has been an integral part of the history of our planet over the past 130 million years and contributes significantly to the present functioning of the earth and its life. The global cycles of a variety of materials fundamental to life and the state of the atmosphere depend to a significant extent on arctic marine processes.

The past decades has seen remarkable changes in the Arctic, of which we do not know whether these represent temporary perturbations, long-term trends, or a new equilibrium. The decrease of sea-ice extent and sea-ice thickness in the past decade is statistically significant. These alterations will directly affect food-web structures and ecosystem functioning.

Enabling the detection of expected changes in abiotic and biotic parameters in a transition zone between the northern North Atlantic and the central Arctic Ocean, the Alfred Wegener Institute established the deep-sea observatory HAUSGARTEN in the eastern Fram Strait.

HAUSGARTEN observatory displays 21 permanent stations covering a water depth range of 250 to 5500 m water depth. Repeated sampling and the deployment of moorings and different free-falling systems which act as observation platforms has taken place since the beginning of the station in summer 1999. At regular intervals, a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) is used for targeted sampling, the positioning and servicing of autonomous measuring instruments and the performance of in situ experiments. Our 3000 m depth-rated Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) allows the sensing and sampling in the water column as well as large-scale observations at the seafloor.

Since 2014, HAUSGARTEN observatory is successively extended within the frame of the HGF infrastructure project FRAM (Frontiers in Arctic marine Monitoring).